Duchamp once argued that there’s no progress in art; Bad Luck Banging makes the case there’s no subversion either. Filled with compelling performances and hypnotic designs, the film aims to push the edges of convention — but to what end?

A teacher releases a sex tape online; that tape gets discovered by a couple of her students; the teacher spends an afternoon walking to a mystery meeting, where a parent-teacher conference decides whether this teacher should resign. The film’s four major movements are divided into three “parts,” with an archival-essay pasted into the middle of the film, and the sex-tape in question shown at the start.

The film — and its marketing — make a big deal of its contemporary nature: it is a film conspicuously made with COVID, patriarchy, and social media in mind; it is a sex-positive film; it is a radical film (politically! formally!); it is an intelligent film. But while Banging expresses an awareness that these are forces worth dealing with — and modalities worth exploring — it’s not clear it has anything of substance to say.

Breezy, smarmy, and lacking in praxis, the film has all the ingredients for an anarchic masterpiece, except a core. It brandishes an irreverence for the filmic medium (or at least the veneer of such irreverence); it links patriarchy and colonialism to the cinematic images that uphold them; it trots a parade of Trotskian theorists; it preaches an appropriate contempt of history; but, all this, it does with no conviction.

Too paternalistic to be punk, too polite to be provocative, the film instead leaves a strong sense of being what it’s subtitled as — a sketch. In an interview with Slant, director Radu Jude states that the film was an experiment, and stricter editing would have only left a “20 or 30 minute” story behind. While this dynamic certainly makes itself felt, the deeper issue permeates even those 20 substantive minutes — what little film Jude does have was undercooked to begin with.

Illustratively, during a scene in which Banging’s characters read out long tracts of theory, its antagonists snicker conspicuously — the filmmakers wink-wink to us that they know theory is boring. Caught between the desire to make a point and make a punchline, they commit to neither — instead, the filmmakers leave only a nesting doll of gutless rhetoric. The film feels in the mold of certain masculo-euro-surrealists’ works, but Banging seems to hold subversion as the end, rather than a means, and — like Buñuel without the bombast, or Makevajev without the madness — this film races to undercut even its mildest provocations. But what’s so subversive about having nothing to stand for, in a world that’s already lacking in integrity?

Its experimental structure falls short of satisfaction as well. Formally, less inventive than most videos on TikTok; intellectually, less hefty than most debates on Twitter; pornographically, ahead of AMC fare but certainly not of OnlyFans — this “here-and-now” film reverse engineers platforms that already exist. Might the movie’s experiments in filling the one-way cinema screen with social media/collectivist aesthetics strike a particular nerve with Romanians, given their alternatingly fascist and communist pasts? Is there a new way forward here that Jude is in a unique position to access? Are Banging’s gestures — toward a new, liberationist cinema — ones the rest of us should follow? There’s a lot of richness to the film, but it’s trapped in an arrière-garde radicality, and in its rush to subvert, it declines to upend.

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